Newtown And The Sweet Hereafter

One of the best films I’ve ever seen was Atom Egoyan’s 1997 adaptation of Russell Banks’s novel The Sweet Hereafter. It is so powerful, and so shattering, that I have not seen it since I became a father; I don’t think I could bear it.

The story is set in a small Canadian village, where many of the town’s children have just died in a school bus accident. Ian Holm plays an ambulance-chasing lawyer who comes to town to drum up business. He goes around visiting the grieving parents, trying to convince them that their children died because of someone else’s fault. It becomes clear that it was nobody’s fault, not really; it just happened, because these things happen in life. Holm is offering the parents the comfort of a reason, however false, why their children were taken from them, by suggesting that if guilty others had made different, more careful decisions, their children would be alive today.

It emerges that Holm’s daughter, Zoe, is lost to him. She is a young adult, and she’s left home, and she’s into drugs and chaotic living. He can’t protect her. And it all brings to mind an event from Zoe’s childhood; it’s the scene from the film I’ve embedded above. Little Zoe was bitten by a poisonous spider, and nearly dies. Her father has to confront his ultimate powerlessness to protect his child from death. In this light, you see that his entire subsequent litigious career is a kind of religious vocation: to impose a false sense of control on what is ultimately uncontrollable, thereby defending against the desperate, primal terror every parent feels.

I think of Auden, from September 1, 1939:

All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night

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10 Responses to Newtown And The Sweet Hereafter

I really identify with this post. The Sweet Hereafter is one of my favorite movies. Maybe not one of the best movies I’ve seen, but definitely one of my favorites. I watched it three or four times. I was also thinking of that movie after this event. Actually, I still think about the movie fairly often, many years after seeing it.

I saw it shortly before my first child was born, and I feel exactly the way you do: I couldn’t watch it now that I’m a father. Since becoming a father I’ve become way over-sensitized to depictions of serious violence, especially involving children. This isn’t anything I’m proud of; I really wish I hadn’t become that way.

I haven’t watched the news this weekend or read any reports that go into any detail at all.

I think most parents know no greater fear than of losing a child. The desire to impose control, to keep the world at bay, is enough to drive both parent and child batty if not kept in check. And I find that this desire increases inversely to my ability to actually exercise that sort of control, now that we’ve got a high schooler in the house.

Another thing that occurs to me in observing and experience our/my reaction to these events is how morally grotesque we have become. Not only in the scale of the senseless violence, but in our response to it: Many of us apparently believe that there must be some public policy solution to the problem of mass killings by deranged or unstable individuals (and maybe there is?), but the public policy of our government – policy that could be changed in an instant – has resulted in the deaths of many times more children in Pakistan alone over the past several years (http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/25/world/asia/pakistan-us-drone-strikes/index.html). Yet this policy – which, again, is within our power to change this very instant – causes none of us grief or even a moment’s reflection. Do Pakistani parents not grieve as we grieve? Do the lives that those children had in front of them matter so much less than the lives of our own nation’s children?

I hope Rod you aren’t suggesting we can’t do anything to insulate our children from many risks. It is clear what killed those children– a semiautomatic in the hands of an unbalanced person. Those two facts present our marching orders, our responsibility as parents, citizens, and human beings.

As a father of two young boys, who I sincerely hope will follow in my footsteps as hunters (for their own rewards, not mine), I know we can reduce the risk of being killed in senseless acts– be they attacks from terrorists or unstable domestics.

Further let us not pretend there is some noble, patriotic right to own an assault rifle. Neither the framers or modern reality endorse that assertion.

If I have misread the intent of your post, my apologies. however, your post reads as an apologist position the NRA often asserts that “if people can’t kill with guns they’ll find another way”. That is a position we should no longer accept and fight like hell.

Why do leftist get to invoke the intentions of the founding fathers, but only on gun control? The founding fathers would have found the concept of marriage and partial birth abortion abhorrent yet the left increasingly claims both as constitutional protected. The left has opted for an evolving standard of constitutional interpretation. Please, for your the sake of your own personal honor at least, restrict your arguments to those terms. What the founding fathers intended does not matter. Like Ezra Klein says that musty old thing is like 200 years old anyways.

If Mike Huckabee is right, God lives in every other country’s schools, except ours. I prefer a more logical explanation – that our gun culture and gun policies have become completely unmoored from basic common sense and morality.

Bob Mitchell I only invoke the constitution because that’s what the rabid pro gun crowd always invokes. I am agreed that the framers were wise but not superhuman; we live in a modern world with our own realities and evolving history. Each moment is an act of remaking the planet we live on.

@ richao, thanks for pointing out this fact about Obama’s child-killing drones. I’ve seen it mentioned somewhere else today, and I don’t think it’s irrelevant. I could maybe even entertain the notion-not that I’m attributing it to you-that Newtown is a judgment on America. But that would be very Old Testament, not New Testament.

I very much enjoyed this film by Atom Egoyan as well. I saw it before I had any children and understood the analogies being made then, but it would have had a yet greater impact on me if it had come along a few years later (as “Life is Beautiful” did in a very visceral way). I once saw Atom Egoyan walking by Air Canada Centre in Toronto in his trademark dark suit jacket. What I was struck by was that he looked so content as he walked down a sterile concrete roadway.

Regarding issues related to gun violence I can only have an opinion as I am not an American citizen (though have many family members that are). It seems to me that a healthy way to deal with this problem would be to not shy away from the difficult questions and from respectful disagreement and discussion. Perhaps listing the knee jerk one-liners and agreeing NOT to start and stop there would be a good thing.

This blog is called The American Conservative and I love to read it because though I suppose from a one-liner list of opinions I am not conservative, its author speaks to many issues that are also important to me; I don’t always agree with him but I am very happy that often I do and always I am challenged to think and have the opportunity to learn. We need to love each other more, differences and all.